Remembering Jeremy Wright ’96

The Canadian hemlock trees are among the most beautiful trees in
Wabash’s Fuller Arboretum and they are my favorites. I’m struck by their
soft green color and the way their limbs gracefully sway in the breeze
all year long. When I walk through the Arboretum, I look up at them as
if they are the old wise men of Wabash, their branches reaching out to
calm anxious Wabash students.

I was explaining what ice storms are to my daughter, Samantha, last
week. As we drove by the Arboretum, I noticed the hemlocks were
particularly at risk from the freezing rain. Those light, airy
branches seemed weighted and heavy. No longer were they swaying; instead
they lunged toward the ground as if the weight of the world was on those
wise shoulders.

Samantha said she thought it looked like the hemlocks were made of
glass. I told her that I thought the hemlocks were weeping and that
every tiny ice crystal was a frozen tear shed for Jeremy Wright,
Wabash’s brave Green Beret who was killed in Afghanistan one week ago.

Jeremy loved the Arboretum and probably ran under those hemlock limbs a
thousand times or more. He loved running anywhere in nature and despised
oval running tracks. To him, tracks meant that you always ended up in
the same place. Jeremy didn’t like running in circles; he wanted to go
places.

Wabash’s most decorated distance runner was also a brilliant student.
After graduating from Wabash he moved out west to run in the mountains
and do a master’s degree. His love of the outdoors -- and pushing his
body to the extreme limits -- was evident wherever Jeremy lived.

Since his death last week, I’ve heard from literally hundreds of people
whose lives he touched in different ways. What I really learned was that
he was a revered world-class athlete, a mountain runner with few peers.
The Vail, Colorado newspaper run back-to-back, front-page stories on
Wright, who was known as competitive, but respectful; a champion without
an ego.

I’ve learned that Jeremy would compete in about any race if it took him
outdoors. Not only did he compete internationally as a sponsored racer
for the U.S. Mountain Racing Team, but he also had few challengers in
snowshoe racing. Roger Busch, one of his best friends and a former
Wabash teammate, told me that if there was an Olympic Snowshoe Racing
Team, Jeremy would easily have been its leader.

He was our Pat Tillman. Like the former NFL player who died pursuing
freedom in the Middle East, Wright joined the Army shortly after the
9/11 attacks. And like Tillman, Wright entered the Special Forces not as
an officer, but as an enlisted man. The military’s recruiting initiative
was to get the best and brightest men to serve as Rangers and Green
Berets. Wright was the latter; a chemistry major and distance runner
turned highly trained soldier.

A month after he got to Afghanistan, in November, he got approval to run
in the mountains outside of Kabul. Jeremy was not the type of man who
could do a day’s work and sit in the barracks watching TV. The mountains
called him and he went to them.

No human sacrifice seems to make sense in this war on terror. But this
was the first time it really hit home for me, my family, and many of our
friends. As a co-worker said to me Thursday, "When you hear the names on
TV, it’s one thing; when it’s someone you know, it causes you to think
about the whole issue differently."

Jeremy was about the best person Wabash can turn out. Bright, confident,
and unassuming, he was an All-American in every sense of the term. And
now he is gone, leaving a very real, tangible void inthis world.

The steady rain of early last week, the dark heavy clouds, and the tears
of ice that formed on the trees of the Fuller Arboretum were, I think,
symbolic of the loss so many of us felt when we heard that Jeremy Wright
was killed by a roadside bomb half a world away. Even the warming
temperatures that thawed those frozen tears gives little solace.

Like the 1,300 families and communities who have mourned fallen
soldiers, we now begin the long, painful process of remembering Jeremy
and imagining our lives without him.

Jim Amidon is director of public affairs and marketing and secretary
at Wabash College. His column appears every Monday in the Journal Review
.